Professional Hard Drive and Flash Data Recovery Services

Fujitsu MPE3170AH Data Recovery Information

These are some real problems experienced by MPE3170AH and Fujitsu hard drives in general that we see in our lab. We are not affiliated in any way with hard drive manufacturers. All the information below is based solely on our experience and we do not make any claims regarding reliability of the specific model. We see mostly failed drives in our lab and therefore we don't have complete statistics.

This drive was used as a 2nd media drive, not the boot drive. It makes a loud clicking sound. The drive can still be seen in "My Computer" but if I try to access it, the whole computer slows to a crawl. Eventually after maybe 5 minutes, a message pops up stating that the drive isn't formatted, would I like to format now? It's a Fujitsu(model MPE3170AH).
Alessandro Nesta
Turin, Italy

Fujitsu hard drives are widely known in data recovery business for their line of MPG hard drives several years ago that had faulty Cirrus Logic chips. Fujitsu manufactured about 5 millions of these hard drives and in November 2002 after a massively reported data losses have admitted the problem. The blame was laid on the supplier of epoxy mould compound used in the manufacture of Cirrus' Himalaya 2.0 and Numbur chips. It was claimed that supplier of the epoxy, a Cirrus Logic sub-contractor - made the first of several changes to its product, and it was this that ultimately caused the chips to fail by short-circuiting thus making the drive faulty and data inaccessible. After several months of use hard drives usually stop to spin up, behave erratically, start clicking etc. Nowadays these otherwise nearly ideal devices are mostly extinct but still sometimes we get them into our data recovery lab and in 100% of the cases we get all data back thanks to Fujitsu perfect mechanics.

Unfortunately this story shook Fujitsu reputation badly and they never manufactured 3.5" IDE drives anymore. Today only drives for laptops and those with SCSI interface can be seen. They are quite rare guests in our lab, thanks again to Fujitsu next to ideal mechanics and firmware implementation.

The drive is a Fujitsu MPE3170AH. It sounds like the heads are going nuts back and forth with various high pitch sounds then the heads stop for a few seconds then start again but no high pitch just clicking like mad.
J.Szabo
Budapest, Hungary

Among the typical mechanical problems 2.5" laptop Fujitsu come into our lab are

bad heads with clicking, knocking or sweeping symptoms , and

heads being stuck to the platters so the drive can't spin up at all.

In both cases these drives need to be opened in class 100 clean room environment in order to retrieve data. Do not attempt to open the hard drive at home - you could scratch the surface and make all your data unrecoverable.

Bad sectors is another common problem for all manufactured hard drives and laptop Fujitsu drives in particular. After some period of time magnetic media the platters are covered with starts to degrade and magnetic domains can't turn in the desired direction by writing element of the head. This is how bad sectors appear.When the drive starts reading data from such unreadable bad sector it could start freezing, scratching and sometimes even clicking . This leads to further damage to the surface, heads and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files stop the drive immediately and send it to our data recovery lab. Any further attempts would just add up to the problems. In our lab we use special imaging hardware tools that are capable of reading raw sector data ignoring checksum check. That's usually the only way to retrieve as much data as possible from such LBAs.

If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Fujitsu MPE3170AH please feel free to contact us to get upfront quote on data recovery from your failed drive.

If you hear your Fujitsu hard drive making some other unusual noises visit our Hard Drive Sounds page for more examples.

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